"A Year in Provence" Reviews & Ratings - IMDb IMDb trailers and videos full cast and crew trivia official sites memorable quotes Overview 31 out of 35 people found the following review useful: As Peter Mayle says, "France is the truffle in our egg box." from Houston, Tx, USA, Earth 6 October 2002 Peter Mayle's "A Year In Provence" was an unexpected success as a book in 1989, and the BBC filmed a version of it for the 1993 mini-series, which I never saw. But now it is also available as a two-disk DVD set, billed as an "A&E" network movie. This review is of that DVD set. I use the term "a version" of the book, because the two are quite different. An anal-retentive person who expects a film like this to be very similar to the book will have much difficulty watching it. However, for most of us who can enjoy a film on its own merits, without comparing it to the book too closely, it is a marvelous film, now one of my favorites.

The entire "film", to use that term rather loosely, consists of four consecutive 90-minute films, two on each DVD, and best watched over 4 consecutive evenings. While the book is organized by months, the film is broken into the four seasons, Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. Where the book begins with their new year in Provence, the film begins with Peter's and Annie's final days at work, and old friends wishing them well in their new careers right before they actually move to France. However the biggest departures are in style and in the characters. The book, written from a diary that Peter kept, is more like a survey of interesting places, characters, events, and customs. It rarely goes into much depth, instead covers his and Annie's experiences very broadly. In contrast, the film treats fewer subjects but explores most of them in more depth. Where the book only mentions the Parisian French, in the film we meet "Evelyn", the frantic woman who speaks an almost unintelligible form of English, who has an eye for Peter, and who almost goes mad trying to shut up the neighbor's cock that crows so loudly in the morning, waking her and her house guests.

In the book, the grape harvest and tour of the community winery is mentioned almost in passing. In the film, a funny story portrays how Peter thought his wine was really wine made from "his" grapes and, only after a multi-stop search finds out that it is simply his share of ordinary wine from the wine co-op. In the book Uncle Edward eagerly takes Peter into his wine cave, gives him an exhaustive tasting, sells him much more wine than he set out to buy. In the film, Uncle Edward "has no wine to sell" and simply dismisses Peter, but this is done as part of a larger episode. There are numerous other such departures, and not much is available about the making of this film, so I have no idea whether the book or the film is more accurate, where there are different versions of the same story. While that may bother some, it doesn't bother me at all. Both versions are thoroughly entertaining. Most noticeable are that virtually all characters in the film have names different from those in the book. The plumber Menucucci from the book becomes Colombani in the film. The strange neighbor Massott who kills foxes becomes Riviere. And in a similar manner other key characters are given different names.

Perhaps this was done for legal reasons, where a diary, even when published, may contain real names, but a film like this may be considered a work of fiction and real names cannot be used. But that is just speculation on my part. There are three main reasons I like this film so much. First, I am from the French-speaking part of Louisiana and can easily see in the various characters people I grew up around. Second, I spent two weeks in Provence during September 1998, with friends in a 200-year-old house not too different from the one the Mayles lived in. The roads, the people, towns like Ile-Sur-La-Sorgue, the aquaduct near Fontaine de Vaucluse, all included in this film and more brings back fond memories. And third, I really like films based on real events. I found that knowing at least rudimentary French helps greatly, even a viewer knowing no French can enjoy it, because key points in dialog are always repeated in English by a character. John Thaw plays Peter Mayle and is very believable, although I don't believe Peter in real life is quite as frumpy as Thaw was here.

Of note, John Thaw died earlier this year, 2002. But most remarkable are the total cast and what a great job they do playing the various French characters, and the various English visitors. Who could forget Alfred Molina's "Tony", the uninvited guest from hell, another portrayal different from the book? The DVD picture and sound are not great, by today's standards, but they are still clearly better than a VHS tape. Anyone who has a fondness for, or just a curiosity about, life in Southern France should enjoy this film, "A Year In Provence." A wonderful, wonderful film. Was the above review useful to you? 18 out of 18 people found the following review useful: A Wonderful Series -- Whether You've Read The Books Or Not from Renton, WA 4 December 2007 I have read several of Peter Mayle's books about living in Provence. And I have seen the BBC mini-series, "A Year In Provence," starring John Thaw and Lindsay Duncan. To say that the BBC mini-series was "based on" the books by Peter Mayle is inaccurate.

Mayle's books could not be directly adapted to television, because they consist mostly of small vignettes about living in Provence. Most of the stories in the books are written in the style of journal entries, and only last a few pages. It is more accurate to say that the mini-series is "inspired by" Peter Mayle's books. The mini-series perfectly captures the spirit of Mayle's books by giving us a series of short, half-hour vignettes about living in Provence. The story: Peter Mayle (John Thaw), a middle-aged advertising executive, retires from his London job and moves to a house in the Provencial region of southern France with his wife Annie (Lindsay Duncan). They want to live the "good life" -- but they quickly discover that, like all good things, the "good life" must be continuously earned, even in a paradise like Provence. Each of the twelve half-hour episodes covers a different month in the Mayles' first "Year in Provence." Over the course of a year, Peter and Annie slowly adjust to life in their new home. Many of the episodes show them experiencing the "culture shock" of living in southeast France.

In February, they must adjust to the "Mistral," the interminable Provencial wind that blows without stopping for an entire month. In September, they harvest the grapes from Peter's wine vineyard -- only to learn that the grapes will not be used to create a great wine, but instead will be processed with grapes from other vineyards into an "industrial wine" at a local factory. And in December, they learn the intricacies and headaches of local politics as a debate rages through their Provincial town over who will play Péré Noel (Father Christmas) on Christmas Eve. Peter and Annie must also learn to live with the eccentricities of the French. These include Riviéré, their scruffy, unwashed neighbor who owns a wood full of high-priced truffle mushrooms; Antoine, the keeper of Peter's backyard vineyard; and the endless stream of workmen, led by the plumber, Mr. Columbani, who come to the Mayles' new house to fix up and remodel the kitchens, bathrooms, etc. As the year progresses, these people will become close friends of the Mayles. In some of the episodes, tales from Mayle's books have been expanded into larger stories.

These include the story of the rich woman who moves to Provence for the peace and quiet, only to find that her next-door neighbor has an unusually-loud and troublesome rooster, and the story of the truffle thief who would rather abandon his wife to the law than give up his treasure of stolen truffles. Other episodes take stories from different sources. One episode re-tells the story of the French film, "The Baker's Wife," as Peter and Annie Mayle try to re-unite Godin, the local baker, with his wayward wife. But at least they have the decency to *acknowledge* where they stole the story. (When Godin's wife has run away, the depressed baker moans to Peter, "It's just like that movie, 'The Baker's Wife.' Except I don't even have a cat to keep me company.") John Thaw provides a solid lead performance as Peter Mayle. He is a mild-mannered man who only wants to live a quiet, enjoyable life. But life in Provence has a way of throwing interesting and nettling obstacles in his path. At first, Mayle reacts to these problems with the disbelief and confusion of a native Londoner living in a strange new environment.

But he gradually comes to accept these problems as part of the wonder of living in Provence. Lindsay Duncan also turns in an admirable performance as Annie, Peter's wife. She is a smart, level-headed woman who can sometimes be more clever and insightful than her husband in solving problems. And there are some great guest role appearances in the mini-series. Alfred Molina has an absolutely terrific part as Tony Havers, an obnoxious, uninvited English house-guest of the Mayles who takes over their house and refuses to leave. French actress Annie Sinigalia has a great role as the neurotic rich woman from Paris, who is attracted to Peter Mayle, but who ultimately can't adjust to living in Provence. And always-wonderful Frank Middlemass appears as an English expatriate who teaches Peter the rules of Boules, Provence's favorite pastime game. And through it all, we get stunning views of Provence, with its mountains, hilltop castles, lavender fields, vineyards, quaint villages, and sun-drenched valleys that seem to stretch forever. "A Year In Provence" is like taking a trip to Provence, and touching its heart and soul. Was the above review useful to you?

10 out of 11 people found the following review useful: Really entertaining series! from United Kingdom 10 February 2009 I have this on VHS, and I enjoyed it enormously. Every single scene had something to smile about, whether it was Peter Mayle struggling with french, or Challemagne the rooster. I have one question, Why did so many people ignore this series at the time? Of course, it fell victim to the Darling Buds of May, which is also wonderful, but this is so relaxing to watch. Provence has never looked so beautiful, some of the landscapes were absolutely gorgeous. John Thaw gives a rock-solid performance, that is always overlooked. When I mention this series to anyone, they are either blank-eyed, or go on criticising the books. Lindsay Duncan is also wonderful as Annie, although I read somewhere, that Thaw's wife Shiela Hancock was originally asked to do the role before the producers decided she was too old. Watch this series, you'll really like it. I am just angry, that this wonderful programme was ignored. 10/10 Bethany Cox Was the above review useful to you?

10 out of 13 people found the following review useful: A Splendid Trip in French Stereotypes from Charlotte NC 11 April 2008 The amount of French language is enormous for an English language production, and that makes it fun to listen and try to understand, because much of the French in conversation is not translated fully. The things that one expects from Provence are all there, and when the expected ending of a story plot does not come and the twist is even more inventive than the simple negation of a stereotype, the narrative really shines. Peter runs the plumber out and you would think that this is the beginning of a rancorous feud, but it's not. Winning at bowling turns out not to be winning after all. The production does its best to include some of the most pointed vignettes of the book. It manages to capture the flavor very well overall. For the strongest sense of the continuity, I recommend that you read the book first; then, when you watch this on VHS/DVD, you can bask in the extra time and story added here to add depth to this stranger and his wife in a foreign land desperately trying to become local and belong. Was the above review useful to you?

5 out of 6 people found the following review useful: The vacation on my DVD shelf from United States - Pacific time zone 18 September 2010 If you've ever harbored a fantasy of living in a foreign country, A Year In Provence is a must see. I've owned the A&E DVD set for awhile and watch this series at least once a year; it's like taking a vacation to a now familiar place where I have friends and know the ropes. I treasure this series as it shows just what it might be like to try to re-settle in a foreign land where you know no one, don't speak the language very well, and, in this case, in a rural area where the residents aren't fluent in English and where you have to conform to their habits, schedules, and priorities. One sees very quickly that moving to a large city might make such a transition easier where services, multi-lingual inhabitants, and common ground are more quickly found. But the charm of this story is watching the husband & wife find their way, played superbly by Lindsay Duncan and John Thaw. Their civilized British take on things is perfectly tuned.

They are the strangers in a strange land and their adjustment to a new and very different lifestyle is always interesting. So many kinds of "normal" behavior are depicted and it is the rural French version that delights; never has normal made me smile so much. The story flows seamlessly through the four seasons of a year and, while the pace is relaxed, there is an assembly of characters and situations that adds just the right spice to keep your attention. Like a fine French meal in the country of origin, by the end you know you've experienced the unique flavor and texture of not only the local food, but also the people, culture, and dilemmas of living country style in Provence. Likely, you'd be able to translate many of the events to almost any country that has indoor plumbing. This is a trip worth taking. 9* out of 10* Was the above review useful to you? An awful, overacted farce. from England 13 April 2016 Having read and re-read the book and Toujours Provence, my wife and I were really looking forward to watching the adaptation. What a let-down it was.

The acting of the two main characters in particular is painfully forced and unnecessarily farcical - it has become a pantomime. The book is genuinely charming, while this is genuinely charmless, cheesy and just rubbish. We also found it insulting to the French locals: in the book, they are gregarious of course, but not bumpkins, simple, or mad. The adaptation completely overemphasises the cultural stereotypes and again is just painfully "British". It was a real letdown. We gave up after the fourth episode before it ruined the book for us. Was the above review useful to you? 2 out of 5 people found the following review useful: Great location, shame about the stereotypes from Australia 24 September 2011 Peter Mayle's book is the type-specimen of the expat setting up in a (slightly) foreign land, and a wry set of vignettes of the learning experience. The film (or more properly telemovie) is an absurd - even offensive - exercise in stereotyping which panders to holiday nostalgia and the idea that France is stuck in a primitive past of 'characters' such as those we find in Marcel Pagnol's books/films and their later adaptations.

That was 100 years ago! Even then they were 'characters' picked out for their end-of-bell-curve status. Some reviewers mention with fondness the appalling house guest and the ridiculous Parisienne, both over-the-top embellishments, if not complete inventions. They are simply not believable, ridiculous cardboard cutouts, highly annoying and a complete detractor from the story. I wonder what Peter Mayle himself thinks of the 'extrapolation' of his book. I will admit to having only watched the first 90 minute episode, but assume the rest is similar. Apart from a bit of personal nostalgia - I love Provence, the old villages and the countryside, and have been through some of the same experiences restoring a house in France (although the day-to-day reality is much more mundane and there are an awful lot of 'normal' people in France who would never make it into this movie) - I found this pastiche of 'characters', Pagnol, scenery and expatriate self indulgence, one of my least satisfying movie experiences for a long time. It's a movie I might well walk out of at the cinema.

I can get the scenery from the Tour de France coverage, the characters in all their richness from Pagnol, and the expat experience from (not always comfortable) reality. Better to watch a travel documentary - skewed of course, but at least some attempt at representing reality in an interesting way. I don't believe that the smaller vignettes of the book could not have been turned into a movie. Obviously it would require a good storyline into which to weave them, but pickign a few and makign them 'episodes' was an easy way out. The use of enough English mixed into the conversations as a mechanism to avoid subtitling is quite a good idea, but could have been done much better eg. the characters could have attempted some believable, halting/incorrect version in French and then quickly repeated in English as a sort of verbal subtitle, instead of speaking English at a Frenchman who ostensibly doesn't understand it and then in other places saying something quite fluently in French with an English word thrown in for some common word that they would clearly know (that would work if they were searching for a technical term). The French characters using occasional English words is quite believable.

OK, this is a bit picky and might not jar so much on someone who only understands the English, but it could have been one of the saving graces of this film if done better. Was the above review useful to you? 1 out of 4 people found the following review useful: disappointing Wonderful book. But what a disappointment. I have tried watching it, twice, but it just doesn't cut the mustard. I wish it were otherwise. Great cast (Thaw / Morse; Duncan / Shooting the Past). The setting is delightful. John Thaw bought a house nearby as a result. But the production was not a commercial success. All is not lost though. If you haven't read the book it was based on then do so, you have something to look forward to. Other reviewers have commented on the book vis a vis this dramatisation, sometimes rather OTT, yet the difference is immense unfortunately. Was the above review useful to you? 2 out of 7 people found the following review useful: The book was better, but it's still worth watching... from United States 11 September 2010 I was worried that this A&E production would lack the charm of the book.

As it turned out, the aesthetics of this film were spot on, even if the French humor was not as well adapted for the screen compared to all those wonderful passages that were peppered throughout the book. I read the book many years before seeing the film, but remarkable, the details were still fresh in my mind, thanks to Mayle's gift of description. I still gave this 4 stars because they did a great job of presenting Provence exactly the way it is and the way one pictures it while reading the book. But it's the book that will always have a special place in my heart. ~NN from Australia 18 January 2011 I watched this series on FTA TV from Radio-Télevision Monte Carlo. It was subtitled in French. I've since read the book, and it's better. But the photography is good, and some of the characters (can you say Rivière?; the Mayles can't, pronouncing it RIViair) are very convincing. But I'm left with the overall impression that this is the British conquest of Provence. The Mayles are the centrepiece, saving the local people from one disaster after another (amongst other things).

Annie doesn't even appear in the book, and my impression is that her name is a pun on the French title "Une année en Provence", but here she's saving the French from themselves. That wasn't necessary, and it strongly detracts from what would otherwise have been a very enjoyable series. How do I rate it? It's difficult to say. I like watching the recordings we made, but every time the sheer Britishness of it gets on my nerves. So: parts of it are excellent, I'll give it a 5. Was the above review useful to you? TELEVISION / Flogging un cheval mort | The Independent TELEVISION / Flogging un cheval mort Sunday 14 March 1993 00:02 BST Click to follow The Independent Culture THERE WAS a strange omission in Radio Times's lipsmacking publicity for A Year in Provence (BBC1). Why no scratch'n'sniff card? Garlic, basil, perhaps a whiff of native, steeped in cassoulet and cunning. We had to make do with the recipes, the wine guide, the holidays and the 'Peter Mayle Audio Tape Giveaway'. A complete giveaway, as it turned out.

This is a marketing concept dressed up as drama: Le Big Idea de Monsieur Mayle, or La Grande Disillusion. After two weeks, disappointment and creeping mirth have given way to a prickly, throat-clearing embarrassment. With another 10 episodes to go, a place in the Hall of Shame is assured. On Drop the Dead Donkey (C4), Dave said to Henry: 'You know you sponsored me a pound for every minute I could sit through A Year in Provence? Well, you owe me 90p.' The book has not travelled well. Mayle's adman prose, heady with escapism, fed the fantasies of shackled middle management. You too, it said, could get off the career ladder and slither down a snake into Eden. It was a lie, of course: that daze of wine and roses doesn't come cheap. Mayle's own dream was featherbedded, and readers fell for its expansive ease in their squillions. On screen, it has contracted into cartoon Berlitz: Marcel the Parcel's pneu est dans la boue.

Helas] The camera stares helpfully at the tyre in the mud, then at the wizened postman's doleful face, then at Mayle (John Thaw) and his wife (Lindsay Duncan). They exchange a wry glance: Johnny Frog] Like the worst sitcom, Provence not only nudges us towards jokes, but tells us how to react to them. There is no give, no grace: when Rivier turns up to explain how to cook fox, Duncan mutters 'absolutely disgusting'. If we don't quite get it, she runs upstairs to be sick. Later, a folksy version of The Magnificent Seven theme heralds the arrival of the builders who come on like a Gallic Wind in the Willows: Ratty, Badger, and other hilarious vermin. Then there is the little local difficulty with the language. Subtitles would have been a turn-off, so the peasants speak French, Annie translates in the great tradition of Brits abroad - slow, loud, capital letters - while Thaw is left with Mayle's come-again-garcon? routine.

Instead of plot, we have incidents: the butcher's shop joke already feels like flogging a dead horse, and almost certainly will be, if the Mayle prejudices run true to form. The actors look spooked, as if catching sight of the ghost of their reputations. The problem is not being out of their depth, but hardly up to their ankles. Duncan's Annie has the perky sexlessness of a children's TV presenter, while Thaw is hopelessly miscast as Mayle's blokeish hail-copain-well-met. Thaw's face is made for melancholy: happiness sits uneasily on it, shifting from side to side trying to get comfortable. It's painful to watch this subtle actor mugging to camera. When he started singing 'Par le light of le silvery moon' I prayed that Sergeant Lewis would stalk out of the darkness and reclaim him for gloom. With The Darling Buds of May, a sort of Cider with Dozy, over on ITV, Sunday has become Britain's night of empty laughter and forgetting. Instead of a 'relentless diet of violence', we are spoon-fed fromage frais. And who's to say which does you more harm?

You probably missed International Women's Day. Only South (C4) marked the occasion, with an agonising triptych of films made by Third World women: Hispanic maids in the US, genital mutilation in Africa, prostitutes in the Philippines. It made unbearable watching, not least because the often crude film-making told you plenty about their predicament: bumpy hand- held cameras trying to get hope into focus. The prostitutes were distraught: feminists had told them they would be fine when the US bases closed. But they had been screwed again: as usual life had proved more complicated than ideology. It was left to Radio 4 to give us a glimpse of First World feminism. On Start the Week, Shere Hite showed what happens when your consciousness is raised so high oxygen can no longer reach your brain. 'What did Wittgenstein ever do for women?' she snapped. Hell, what did Shakespeare ever do for trees? This browbeating of the politically incorrect dead looked even more shameful when you saw the brave women featured in an excellent Timewatch on The Pill (BBC2). It is only 30 years since women got a chance to take it - if their husbands would sign a paper giving permission.

A farmer's wife talked about enjoying sex for the first time; another woman walked crying down Memory Lane - the back street where she had had her abortion. Fay Hutchinson, one of the family-planning doctors who withstood the furious headlines, put the revolution in a nutshell: 'I think people realised that if you couldn't control women with fear, how did you control them?' There is no controlling Lucinda Lambton. It was hard to imagine her Alphabet of Britain (BBC2) surpassing L, in which she visited a shrine to a poodle. I won't forget Jayne Mansfield's hand descending from a plaster cloud to guide those tiny paws into a stippled pink heaven. But K is for Kensal Green Cemetery was sublime. In the 19th century, this was the place to be seen dead in. Lucinda swished through the grass in a vast brown oilskin with matching sombrero, like an ocean-going Father Brown. As a gel, she no doubt got pashes on chaps, and now she has them on things. Her gift is to animate the inanimate.

She introduced the tombs as if they were shy guests at a drinks party: here's Blondin, the tightrope walker, 'crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope in 1859, then blindfold, then on stilts, then pushing his manager in a wheelbarrow'. Ah, and there's his friend the poet Thomas Hood - 'a very sad life'. She recites Hood's 'Song of the Shirt', rolling each r into a Gatling gun that threatens to shoot a chunk off his monument. Director Neil Crombie captured the hushed pomp and beauty of the place: the camera lingered on a marble goddess dappled with lichen, cradling an urn as if it were a drowned child. When Lucinda sat on Henry 'A Life On the Ocean Wave' Russell's chair and began to sing, it moved back to a twinkling ironic distance, but not so far as to be complicit in any ridicule. Lucinda is daffy, which is not to be confused with dizzy, as we saw when she found the modern part of the cemetery 'like the saddest Sixties development'.

Cemeteries of the past were 'morally uplifting oases, reflecting the taste and dreams of the age,' she shouted. 'What in heaven's name do these sterile stumps reflect of our dreams?' We left her pondering the actress 'of whom it was said that the Pantomime Fairy she played at Christmas was less important than the everyday fairy she played for the poor.' Everyday fairy does for Lucy: this programme lasts just 10 minutes, and is magic. As was Arena's Zhang Yimou, A Story of China (BBC2). We got rare access to the young director - a prettier Bruce Lee, talking us through his life. Zhang and his family, 'a bad element', were sent to work in the fields. Three years later, he wangled a job in a textile factory. The smiling manager recalled the 'creative talent' which got Zhang promoted to designing socks. The patterns, proudly preserved, brought tears to your eyes for the millions who never got a toehold on greatness. Zhang was eloquent about Chinese psychology: 'a thief's mind without a thief's guts', and his own struggle for self in a country where difference is treason.

In Beijing, the pudgy beaming head of the Film Bureau showed what he is up against: 'Films must achieve a good social result, although of course we also advocate letting a hundred flowers blossom]' Red Sorghum, one of the loveliest blooms of recent cinema, was banned in China, and the authorities demanded its Oscar nomination be withdrawn: 'We hoped the director would make relevant alterations. He agreed, but found himself too busy.' In a week when the call for films with a good social result reached the leader column of the Times, it was chastening to see an artist working with his hands tied, and his head in a noose. More about: TELEVISION / Flogging un cheval mort | The Independent TELEVISION / Flogging un cheval mort Sunday 14 March 1993 00:02 BST Click to follow The Independent Culture THERE WAS a strange omission in Radio Times's lipsmacking publicity for A Year in Provence (BBC1). Why no scratch'n'sniff card? Garlic, basil, perhaps a whiff of native, steeped in cassoulet and cunning.

We had to make do with the recipes, the wine guide, the holidays and the 'Peter Mayle Audio Tape Giveaway'. A complete giveaway, as it turned out. This is a marketing concept dressed up as drama: Le Big Idea de Monsieur Mayle, or La Grande Disillusion. After two weeks, disappointment and creeping mirth have given way to a prickly, throat-clearing embarrassment. With another 10 episodes to go, a place in the Hall of Shame is assured. On Drop the Dead Donkey (C4), Dave said to Henry: 'You know you sponsored me a pound for every minute I could sit through A Year in Provence? Well, you owe me 90p.' The book has not travelled well. Mayle's adman prose, heady with escapism, fed the fantasies of shackled middle management. You too, it said, could get off the career ladder and slither down a snake into Eden. It was a lie, of course: that daze of wine and roses doesn't come cheap. Mayle's own dream was featherbedded, and readers fell for its expansive ease in their squillions.

On screen, it has contracted into cartoon Berlitz: Marcel the Parcel's pneu est dans la boue. Helas] The camera stares helpfully at the tyre in the mud, then at the wizened postman's doleful face, then at Mayle (John Thaw) and his wife (Lindsay Duncan). They exchange a wry glance: Johnny Frog] Like the worst sitcom, Provence not only nudges us towards jokes, but tells us how to react to them. There is no give, no grace: when Rivier turns up to explain how to cook fox, Duncan mutters 'absolutely disgusting'. If we don't quite get it, she runs upstairs to be sick. Later, a folksy version of The Magnificent Seven theme heralds the arrival of the builders who come on like a Gallic Wind in the Willows: Ratty, Badger, and other hilarious vermin. Then there is the little local difficulty with the language. Subtitles would have been a turn-off, so the peasants speak French, Annie translates in the great tradition of Brits abroad - slow, loud, capital letters - while Thaw is left with Mayle's come-again-garcon? routine.

Instead of plot, we have incidents: the butcher's shop joke already feels like flogging a dead horse, and almost certainly will be, if the Mayle prejudices run true to form. The actors look spooked, as if catching sight of the ghost of their reputations. The problem is not being out of their depth, but hardly up to their ankles. Duncan's Annie has the perky sexlessness of a children's TV presenter, while Thaw is hopelessly miscast as Mayle's blokeish hail-copain-well-met. Thaw's face is made for melancholy: happiness sits uneasily on it, shifting from side to side trying to get comfortable. It's painful to watch this subtle actor mugging to camera. When he started singing 'Par le light of le silvery moon' I prayed that Sergeant Lewis would stalk out of the darkness and reclaim him for gloom. With The Darling Buds of May, a sort of Cider with Dozy, over on ITV, Sunday has become Britain's night of empty laughter and forgetting. Instead of a 'relentless diet of violence', we are spoon-fed fromage frais. And who's to say which does you more harm?

You probably missed International Women's Day. Only South (C4) marked the occasion, with an agonising triptych of films made by Third World women: Hispanic maids in the US, genital mutilation in Africa, prostitutes in the Philippines. It made unbearable watching, not least because the often crude film-making told you plenty about their predicament: bumpy hand- held cameras trying to get hope into focus. The prostitutes were distraught: feminists had told them they would be fine when the US bases closed. But they had been screwed again: as usual life had proved more complicated than ideology. It was left to Radio 4 to give us a glimpse of First World feminism. On Start the Week, Shere Hite showed what happens when your consciousness is raised so high oxygen can no longer reach your brain. 'What did Wittgenstein ever do for women?' she snapped. Hell, what did Shakespeare ever do for trees? This browbeating of the politically incorrect dead looked even more shameful when you saw the brave women featured in an excellent Timewatch on The Pill (BBC2). It is only 30 years since women got a chance to take it - if their husbands would sign a paper giving permission.

A farmer's wife talked about enjoying sex for the first time; another woman walked crying down Memory Lane - the back street where she had had her abortion. Fay Hutchinson, one of the family-planning doctors who withstood the furious headlines, put the revolution in a nutshell: 'I think people realised that if you couldn't control women with fear, how did you control them?' There is no controlling Lucinda Lambton. It was hard to imagine her Alphabet of Britain (BBC2) surpassing L, in which she visited a shrine to a poodle. I won't forget Jayne Mansfield's hand descending from a plaster cloud to guide those tiny paws into a stippled pink heaven. But K is for Kensal Green Cemetery was sublime. In the 19th century, this was the place to be seen dead in. Lucinda swished through the grass in a vast brown oilskin with matching sombrero, like an ocean-going Father Brown. As a gel, she no doubt got pashes on chaps, and now she has them on things. Her gift is to animate the inanimate.

She introduced the tombs as if they were shy guests at a drinks party: here's Blondin, the tightrope walker, 'crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope in 1859, then blindfold, then on stilts, then pushing his manager in a wheelbarrow'. Ah, and there's his friend the poet Thomas Hood - 'a very sad life'. She recites Hood's 'Song of the Shirt', rolling each r into a Gatling gun that threatens to shoot a chunk off his monument. Director Neil Crombie captured the hushed pomp and beauty of the place: the camera lingered on a marble goddess dappled with lichen, cradling an urn as if it were a drowned child. When Lucinda sat on Henry 'A Life On the Ocean Wave' Russell's chair and began to sing, it moved back to a twinkling ironic distance, but not so far as to be complicit in any ridicule. Lucinda is daffy, which is not to be confused with dizzy, as we saw when she found the modern part of the cemetery 'like the saddest Sixties development'.

Cemeteries of the past were 'morally uplifting oases, reflecting the taste and dreams of the age,' she shouted. 'What in heaven's name do these sterile stumps reflect of our dreams?' We left her pondering the actress 'of whom it was said that the Pantomime Fairy she played at Christmas was less important than the everyday fairy she played for the poor.' Everyday fairy does for Lucy: this programme lasts just 10 minutes, and is magic. As was Arena's Zhang Yimou, A Story of China (BBC2). We got rare access to the young director - a prettier Bruce Lee, talking us through his life. Zhang and his family, 'a bad element', were sent to work in the fields. Three years later, he wangled a job in a textile factory. The smiling manager recalled the 'creative talent' which got Zhang promoted to designing socks. The patterns, proudly preserved, brought tears to your eyes for the millions who never got a toehold on greatness. Zhang was eloquent about Chinese psychology: 'a thief's mind without a thief's guts', and his own struggle for self in a country where difference is treason.

In Beijing, the pudgy beaming head of the Film Bureau showed what he is up against: 'Films must achieve a good social result, although of course we also advocate letting a hundred flowers blossom]' Red Sorghum, one of the loveliest blooms of recent cinema, was banned in China, and the authorities demanded its Oscar nomination be withdrawn: 'We hoped the director would make relevant alterations. He agreed, but found himself too busy.' In a week when the call for films with a good social result reached the leader column of the Times, it was chastening to see an artist working with his hands tied, and his head in a noose. More about: 'At last, I can swim in our pool with my son' - Telegraph 'At last, I can swim in our pool with my son' Lindsay Duncan: 'swimming is now part of my life' By Barbara Lantin 12:01AM BST 23 Jul 2004 Until 10 years ago, actress Lindsay Duncan, 52, could not take her feet off the bottom of a swimming pool.

"I had very insensitive group teaching at primary school, of the kind where 40 kids stand in a long line and everybody jumps in at once. I was very frightened of getting horizontal in the water and putting my face in. "I played an Olympic swimmer in a television series called Traffik, which is a joke, and I was sent to an Olympic pool to prepare. I tried very hard, but all I achieved was taking gulps of air and splashing towards the side of the pool with my heart pounding." Realising that unless she took some action, she would never be able to enjoy carefree holiday moments in the water with her young son Cal, now 12, Duncan enrolled for a course of lessons with Steven Shaw. "The most important thing was that he acknowledged my fear. There was no question of my having to pull myself together," she says. Related Articles Relax – then take the plunge 23 Jul 2004 "He stressed what it felt like to be in the water, which is an extraordinary place, rather than focusing on swimming. He showed me that if you clench your fist in the water, it will stay under, but if you open your hand and let go, your whole arm just floats to the surface.

"In a very simple way, he demonstrated that being tense produces the very situation you don't want. And, of course, all fear is about not letting go. Everything he said made sense." Duncan, who is best known for her role as Peter Mayle's wife in the television series A Year in Provence, made time in a tight schedule to take regular lessons. She was soon able to glide without support, but it was several months before she could swim confidently. "We worked at my pace, which was sometimes laughable: it wasn't even progress. But now I swim rather well and I have very high standards. Swimming gives me a huge amount of pleasure, even joy. Instead of being the one sitting by the pool wrapped up to protect my incredibly fair skin from the sun, I am able to get in with my son and feel a huge sense of achievement. "We have just bought a house in south-west France. It has no furniture, but the pool has been dug. Swimming is now a part of my life."

Question: In the television programme 'A Year In Provence', which actress played the part of Peter Mayle's wife?
Answer: LINDSAY DUNCAN